Perfect dinner party disaster

Here is another strange but often impressively original film from Dominik Moll, who made Harry, He's Here to Help. It starts marvellously as Alain (Laurent Lucas) and his wife, Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), move to a new city where he works as an engineer-cum-inventor.

His new boss (André Dussollier) is impressed and accepts an invitation to dinner at Alain's flat. Arriving late with his wife (Charlotte Rampling), it is clear that the visitors have just had a major row, and it is embarrassingly continued over dinner.

They leave halfway through, after the boss's wife has thrown a glass of wine over her husband, accusing him of having just visited a prostitute.

This disastrous evening and the discovery of a mysterious rodent in the young couple's kitchen wastepipe precipitates a severe crisis in their hitherto ordered lives. When the boss's wife comes round again, to apologise, the results are catastrophic.

Meanwhile, the rodent is discovered to be a lemming, never before found in France. And we all know that lemmings self-destruct.

This opening 45 minutes or so looks and feels very like a really tasty tale from Chabrol, who is also good at dinner parties that go insidiously wrong. Thereafter, Moll's film becomes more and more unlike the psychological thriller we were led to expect.

Frankly, I could have done without the rodent sub-plot. But Moll's skill as a film-maker and a more or less perfect cast make Lemming an intriguing experience.